Raising the Wind

I should confess right away that I spent two years as a student in a conservatory, and have spent all my life hanging around with musicians. I'm sure that influenced my positive opinion about this movie, and I can understand why other reviewers who don't share my background don't find it funny.

I knew I was going to enjoy it when the opening credits featured cartoons by the inimitable Gerard Hoffunung. The cast list also promised a host of Britain's most amusing character players. The script and score are by Bruce Montgomery, a fine mystery writer and film composer. And how odd that the opening scene outside the music school used the exact same filming location as was used for the hospital in "Doctor in the House." (Not to mention that the doctor's nemesis also plays the students' nemesis here, too.)

Of course, as others have pointed out, most of the actors are too old for their "student" roles, and the plot is fairly thin (but typical for a sitcom). What's funny for me are all the jokes and situations that any working musician will have had to deal with: overbearing teachers, time-wasting teachers, blabbing conductors, over-confident student hot-shots, conflict between "serious" and "pop" music, etc. If you don't know who Barbirolli and Sargent are, you'll miss a couple of jokes. (And you might not also catch the "skeletons on a tin roof" joke from Sir Thomas Beecham.) There's even a tip of the hat to Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, if you look carefully at the music school sign.

The 90 minutes breezed by, and the HD version available on Amazon Prime looked pristine on my iPad. Recommended highly for musical people; and fairly highly for fans of mid-century British comedy. Kenneth Williams alone is worth the price of admission.

Take the series formula for DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE (including James Robertson Justice as the tyrannical authority, of course), change the setting from a hospital to a music school and swap out director Ralph Thomas for his little brother Gerald and you have this movie, an amusing if formulaic comedy.

Gerald Thomas was best known for directing three billion CARRY ON movies and TV episodes, and there are a couple of differences in the handling of the movie. In the DOCTOR movies, there was a central character, originally played by Dirk Bogarde. This movie is far more an ensemble affair, and the director uses several of his CARRY ON regulars to good effect. Eric Barker is particularly amusing as a vague composition teacher who tells Paul Massie to take up golf so they can have something to talk about during lessons.

The actors playing students seem a little long in the tooth for students, but like all good comedies, it's more about the performances than making sure people look exactly like their characters should (although putting glasses on Liz Fraser to make her look more intellectual than her usual dizzy blonde character is a reasonable effort). All in all, Thomas directs a movie that is nicely placed in tone between the two popular series.

It,s Interesting that the reviews here criticising it are British and the one who gives it the thumbs up is American and I agree with him this film is very good. It,s less smutty than the carry on films and not really slapstick It,s just good clean fun.

This may not be the greatest film ever made but it is good. A great cast and they do deliver they Hit the Right Note It,s funny and well written, Jill Ireland appears in one of her first roles as does Jim Dale Who after this film got the recommendation of Kenneth Williams to join the Carry on team, (His first Carry On, Cabby, wasn,t originally a carry on).

It seems that the British are the first to run British films down, thats sad.

Peter Rogers produces, Gerald Thomas directs, it's got Sid James and Kenneth Williams in it, but it's not a Carry On.

It's got James Robertson Justice as the irascible professor who disguises his real opinions of his students by being offensive.

So it's a Doctor In The House movie, except that it's set in a music college (which happens to look immensely like University College London on the outside, and which has a dead ringer for the Conway Hall as its main theatre).

JRJ is fun to watch, but this is very drab fare indeed.

A group of students at an elite music school decide to share a flat in order to cut their living costs and have somewhere to practice together. They get into quite a few scraps and adventures, including impersonating a celebrity quintet. However when Mervyn Hughes accidentally sells a catchy pop tune to an advertising agency he risks losing his scholarship unless he and his friends can raise the money to buy the rights back.

With an impressive sounding Carry-On cast featuring quite a few famous names from British comedy I was quite looking forward to this being a gently amusing little piece. Sadly I was fooled and this film turned out to be as weak and unfunny as you can imagine. The plot sees some of the oldest students I've seen sharing a flat; from here the plot has a few adventures, before splitting to be about Hughes' drunken mistakes and Malcolm's attempts to win a conducting prize. None of it really engages and, more importantly, none of it is ever really funny.

It's a shame cause you can see what they are trying to do, but none of it works and the talented cast are left high and dry without anything that is more than sporadically funny. Phillips does his usual stuff but he isn't that good; Fraser is cast as a dream girl but I have never found her looks to be worthy of that sort of role. The rest of the students seem quite bland and unmemorable - making it hard to care. Justice is OK and has good screen presence and the support cast includes cameos from James, Williams and Dale but they don't do much.

Overall this is a pretty big disappointment. The plot doesn't engage but that wouldn't matter if I'd laughed at least once or twice - but I didn't. A talented cast may draw viewers to this film but I can guarantee that they won't be enough to keep you watching. A real shame - puts paid to the idea that British comedy of the period could do no wrong.